So, yeah. I'm upset at the way that the current spate of "hacked celebrity nudes" has created a noxious victim blaming firestorm here on the internet, stemming mostly from everyone wanting to see Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton naked, feeling guilty, and then shifting that guilt onto those girls as to feel a little bit better about looking at their intimate photos. Pretty lame, even for you, Millhouse.

That dude from Brand New sings a line that I think is pretty good: “Jesus Christ, I’m not scared to die. I’m a little bit scared of what comes after.” It’s evocative of the weird uncertain relationship humanity has with death, but I think it’s wrong. Being dead is a breeze. We’ve all already done it before. Begin at the moment you were born and go backwards to the beginning of time. How long is that? If you answered anything other than “an infinite amount of time” then god bless your foolish heart. You’ve already not existed for eternity and you’re fine right now, right?

I don’t really think that I’m out of line when I say that a bunch of grown men pulling a kid into a room and injecting him with a drug that will cause him to get a boner and then taking pictures of said boner is a fucked up, terrible thing. Yet that’s exactly what seems to be on the verge of happening in Manassas, VA as retribution for a 17 year old guy texting a picture of his boner to his 15 year old then-girlfriend during a sexy text exchange. The girl seems to have texted pictures of herself to the boy as well, but it was the girl’s mom who found the boner on her daughter’s phone and...

It’s fine, I guess. I don’t wanna shit on any traditions, but it IS more or less a waste of time and energy at best and at worst it’s a terrible platform for some dumb dick who lucked into a lottery-win caliber job to reinforce their own deluded notion that they understand how the world works better than everyone else (this is particularly funny because there’s almost no one less qualified to explain to young people how to make it in the world than people who get paid millions of dollars to pretend to be other people, write laws about other people, or play shitty pop songs)....

My friend and mentor Mike Burkett is very fond of telling people, ‘Don’t compare your band to NOFX. We’re an anomaly and no one can expect to do what we did,’ and he’s right. There’s no REASON that NOFX is huge and are going to be huge forever. Sure, they write great songs (so did American Steel). Sure, they’re funny as hell (so are the Dickies). Sure, they helped define a genre (so did the Suicide Machines). None of that shit matters, y’all. And this is true in every field, creative or scientific, or anything in between. There’s hard work and there’s talent, and those...

I’m in a band and no one takes people in bands, ESPECIALLY small bands, seriously), but generally, I’m totally cool with that. I like trying my hand at selling myself and my projects to Hollywood, I’ve got pretty thick skin, AND, at this point I’m experienced at this shit. I’ve been rejected by everyone from Clint Eastwood to CAA to New Line to MTV and on and on down the line. It’s always a pretty good story and beyond that, it’s a blast to come up with something and get all excited about the fame and fortune that it’s gonna bring me, and then coast back down to earth once I realize that I’ve been rejected again. This is usually the point where I...

Brendan Kelly and Sam Russo are teaming up for a 7" called Split the Tip, which will be released digitally through Red Scare Industries on May 13 and physically on May 20. Today we're bringing you a stream of "Frangelico Houston", which is one of Brendan's songs that you can hear in the replies. According to him it's written about the time he hung out with Peter Murphy and he was drunk in the morning. Lines in the song are lifted from actual conversations that they had. If you like the song pre-orders are currently available.

Brendan Kelly of The Lawrence Arms has written a blog about getting old in punk-rock. Or something like that ... my own old age has led to me having to squint to read the text on the screen.

That’s why people were so blown away when a band like the Starting Line made these songs that resonated with so many people. “That kid’s only fucking 17!” motherfuckers were saying, and that’s why when Nomeansno put out the spectacular All Roads Lead To Ausfahrt a few years back, people were like, “DAAAAMN! These old ass men have not lost a SINGLE FUCKING STEP!!! They’re still THE BEST!” (go listen to the song Mr. In Between if you doubt the fury of the mighty, unbreakable power of Nomeansno, and...

Get out there and play as soon and as often as possible, because you’ll never be good until you start figuring out what you really sound like, and the only way to do that is to watch strangers, who don’t give a fuck about your feelings, get bored and walk away during your long, meticulous intro or guitar solo. Comedians talk a lot about how the only way to get good at standup is to bomb, and the same goes for playing rock and roll. Until you’ve tried ‘em out on other people, chances are, you THINK your ideas are way cooler than they are. Playing in front of people will slap your blinders off fast. The best crash course...

The Fest has added a couple dozen bands, including RVIVR, Diarrhea Planet, The Dangerous Summer, The Last (featuring Bill Steneson and Karl Alvarez), Brainworms (reunion), Little League (final show), Brendan Kelly, Diamond Youth, Army of Ponch and more. The total number of bands playing Fest 12 is now 395. Additional, the schedule for Big Pre-Fest In Little Ybor can be seen here. Tickets are here and the full lineup is in the replies.

Comedian Kyle Kinane and some of his friends (among which is musical guest Brendan Kelly of The Lawrence Arms) put together a self-proclaimed 'love letter to Chicago' comedy show a few months ago, and the general public is finally able to purchase it starting today. Entitled 'Dancing Around the S*** Fire,' it highlights Kinane's "return to a sold out crowd to confess his hilariously true stories and hijinks of living in the ‘Windy City’." You can check out the purchase optionshere.

Speaking of, Blink’s compound guards were told to memorize the faces of the dudes in the band because they didn’t want to have to wear or show passes. That’s a cool perk of being in a 3 piece that I’ve not experimented with yet (side note, Travis wasn’t there, which prompted us to consider that he’s far and away the most famous of those dudes. Can you think of any other band in the history of the world where the [non singing] drummer is the most famous guy in the band? That’s just weird).

When it began, straight edge was a term coined by Ian MacKaye in a Minor Threat tune and it had to do with his personal technique for keeping it together and how it sometimes made him feel like an outsider. He’s been pretty vocal about the fact that he never set it up to be a dogma or anything. In fact, in the very song where he lists off what gives him his ‘straight edge,’ he literally says “listen, there’s no set of rules.” However, like so many people who condemn homodom based on scripture, yet persist in eating shellfish, a lot of people took the “I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t fuck” section to be...

So I was thinking about this interview I read with Billie Joe Armstrong around ‘99, and he said something to the effect of: “The way I know if my lyrics are good is if I’m nervous to sing them in front of people.” Like, if the content kind of freaks you out, that’s when you know you’re getting somewhere. So these songs were coming out kind of weird, and I was like, “Let’s push them to be even more…dark.” And I am nervous, and that’s why the song about cutting up little kids and stuff, that kind of came out of that entire notion.

The funny thing is, here in America, we’ve closed down all the supercomputer repair shops except for the ones that are located inside jails. Beyond that, because these computers are SO powerful, we, as a nation have decided to be very, very afraid of people with malfunctioning computers to the point where we stigmatize and marginalize them. Consider that.

So, here’s the worst possible interview questions that you can be asked, in no particular order: “What does your band sound like, for those people out there who haven’t heard you?” “Who are your influences?” “What does your band name mean?” and finally, my personal least favorite “What’s the craziest thing that’s ever happened to you on tour?” Let’s go through these one by one and discuss why they’re questions that suck.

Check out our interview with Brendan Kellyhere. We discuss his new project, The Lawrence Arms, his blog and more.

From the Interview

Me and Chris have gotten together three times already to show each other stuff. Right now we’re in the beginning stages of getting our footing back and remembering what the band sounded like. I’ve got three songs that I’ve showed him along with some other ideas and he's showed me two songs himself. It’s in the early stages, but that stuff has the tendency to start rolling pretty fast once it’s been started. We’re hoping to get in the studio sometime before the summer ends.

This is a little something Nick and I have been working on. It's kind of a small companion to the new Wandering Birds record. The title of this is either "The Spirit Of Transparency" or "the Betrothed" depending on if you trust the top of the Vimeo page or the title in the actual video. Whatever. We can't be expected to synchronize every little thing. Enjoy, fuckers.

Firstly, you are the one that’s in charge, whether it seems like it or not. Here’s what I mean: everyone is an armchair quarterback. Everyone who likes something thinks they know exactly how to make it better or to keep it successful in the face of perceived mismanagement. This is a universal human trait (this is even MORE universal than the notion of people being cruel to public figures, in fact) and it manifests in sports, politics, writing, television and music. But those people (us, because all of us do this), about 99.9999999 percent of the time have NO FUCKING IDEA...